MindFood: Super 8 and Viral Marketing

By Peter Hall , Hollywood.com Staff | Tuesday, May 18, 2010

I love J.J. Abrams. Not because I've been a die hard Lost fan since the beginning. Not because I'm a big fan of Fringe or thought that Star Trek was one of the most entertaining blockbusters of 2009. I love Abrams because he's one of the few talents in Hollywood who seems to remember what life was like before trailers, TV spots and the Internet. He remembers that part of what made going to the movies so special decades ago was discovering something you knew next to nothing about. I also love that he has earned the clout to convince a major studio like Paramount to be more modest in their traditional ad campaigns.

It's funny to me, then, that Abrams is one of the few people in Hollywood who also actively encourages people to try to subvert the controlled flow of promotional materials by digging around online and discovering info for themselves. Viral marketing campaigns have been around since well before Abrams got into the game, but his repeated involvement with projects that revel in their own mysteries has married his name to the concept. And now that his next directorial project, Super 8, is (publicly) underway with Steven Spielberg on board as an executive producer and noted creative influence, Abrams is once again standing behind the kind of viral projects that became staples of Cloverfield and Lost.

It all started with discovery of the tie-in website ScariestThingIEverSaw.com. Fast forward a few days - you can read far more elaborate details concerning how each piece of information was discovered at - and fans have already dug up seemingly everything that is currently tied to Super 8. The findings consist of some forged newspaper clippings that, when closely analyzed, reveal mentions of characters who are suspiciously similar to famous real-world UFO believers as well as a coded message that is most logically translated as, "No certainty if alive, may be after us, we go underground."

It's a thrilling discovery, no doubt, particularly if you're one of the people who helped unearth it all, but I do have one problem with it. Viral marketing campaigns are largely pointless. Every now and then they reveal a juicy nugget of information, but for the most part they never bear much fruit, only more questions. That's especially true if the campaign in question is for an Abrams-related project; historically they have very little to do with the actual film at hand.

Viral marketing campaigns for movies exist purely to be talked about, not to actually reward the people who pour hour after hour into cracking mysteries that have been meticulously designed by third party companies. They exist so that a small minority of people can dedicate a ridiculous amount of time and energy to solving a problem in the hope that a large majority of people, mainly movie sites, will pick up on their discoveries and then spread the word. At the end of the day, all the studio (and whatever company they've hired) cares about are how many more mentions of their film's title resulted from that viral game. And that's kind of bullshit, if you ask me.

I get that the word marketing is an integral part of what's going on here, but I think it's a little exploitative of your fans to have them go through all this trouble and then offer them little more than the satisfaction that they've solved a puzzle. It's not as though they're being treated to exclusive clips of the film early on that non-hunters are going without, because, well, that would break with Abrams' more important agenda of keeping it all a secret. All they're doing is donating their time to promote a film. It's the 21st Century version of a street team, which would be all well and good except street teams are typically rewarded for their devotion.

I know we're in the early stages of the Super 8 viral campaign (the film is a year away, after all), but I really hope Paramount, Abrams and company all break with their own tradition. Take a page out of the Tron Legacy handbook. Disney's viral campaign for their highly anticipated sequel has fans not only digging around online, but heading out into the real world to track down one-of-a-kind collectibles. That's a rare kind of reciprocation in the viral movie world.

Now none of this is to say that I'm not looking forward to Super 8. It's supposed to be a throwback to the early career of Spielberg, how can I not look forward to it? But I am not looking forward to another retread of the Cloverfield campaign. I don't want to go through the cycles of excitement over reading what kind of information people have dug up only to finally see the film and realize that those collective hundreds of man hours have resulted in what basically amounts to Easter Eggs within the film. There is just too little return on investment there to ever make it worth while.